UNIX and Linux systems use “init scripts” – scripts typically placed in /etc/init.d/ which are run when the system starts up and shuts down (or changes runlevels, but we won’t go into that level of detail here, being more of a sysadmin topic than a shell scripting topic). In a typical setup, /etc/init.d/myservice is linked to /etc/rc2.d/S70myservice. That is to say, /etc/init.d/myservice is the real file, but the rc2.d file is a symbolic link to it, called "S70myservice". The “S” means “Start”, and “70” says when it should be run – lower-numbered scripts are run first. The range is usually 1-99, but there are no rules. /etc/rc0.d/K30myservice (for shutdown), or /etc/rc6.d/K30myservice (for reboot; possibly a different scenario for some services), will be the corresponding “Kill” scripts. Again, you can control the order in which your services are shut down; K01* first, to K99* last.

All of these rc scripts are just symbolic links to /etc/init.d/myservice, so there is just one actual shell script, which takes care of starting or stopping the service. The Samba init script from Solaris is a nice and simple script to use as an example:

The init daemon, which controls init scripts, calls a startup script as "/etc/rc2.d/S70myservice start", and a shutdown script as "/etc/rc0.d/K30myservice stop". So we have to check the variable $1 to see what action we need to take. (See http://steve-parker.org/sh/variables2.shtml to read about what $1 means – in this case, it’s either “start” or “stop”).

So we use case (follow link for more detail) to see what we are required to do.

In this example, if it’s “start”, then it will run the three commands:

Where line 1 checks that smb.conf exists; there is no point continuing if it doesn’t exist, just “exit 0″ (success) so the system continues booting as normal. Lines 2 and 3 start the two daemons required for Samba.

If it’s “stop”, then it will run these two commands:

pkill smbd
pkill nmdb

pkill means “Process Kill”, and it simply kills off the two processes started by the “start” option.

The "*)" construct catches any other uses, and simply replies that the correct syntax is to call it with either “start” or “stop” – nothing else will do. Some services allow for status reports, restarting, and so on. The one thing we do need to provide is “start”. Most services also have a “stop” function. All others are optional.

The simplest possible init script would be this, to control an Apache webserver:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/apachectl $1

Apache comes with a program called “apachectl” (or “apache2ctl”), which will take “stop” and “start” as arguments, and act accordingly. It will also take “restart”, “status”, “configtest”, and a few more options, but that one-line script would be enough to act as /etc/init.d/apache, with /etc/rc2.d/S90apache and /etc/rc0.d/K10apache linking to it. To be frank, even that is not necessary; you could just link /usr/sbin/apachectl into /etc/init.d/apache. In reality, it’s normally good to provide a few sanity-checks in addition to the basic stop/start functionality.

The vast majority of init scripts use the case command; around that, you can wrap all sorts of other things – most GNU/Linux distributions include a generic reporting script (typically /lib/lsb/init-functions – to report “OK” or “FAILED”), read in a config file (like the Samba example above), define functions for the more involved aspects of starting, stopping, or reporting on the status of the service, and so on.

Some (eg, SuSE) have an “INIT INFO” block, which may allow the init daemon a bit more control over the order in which services are started. Ubuntu’s Upstart is another; Solaris 10 uses pmf (Process Monitor Facility), which starts and stops processes, but also monitors them to check that they are running as expected.

After a good decade of stability, in 2007 the world of init scripts appears to be changing, potentially quite significantly. However, I’m not here to speculate on future developments, this post is just to document the stable interface which is init scripts. Even if other things change, the basic “start|stop” syntax is going to be with us for a long time to come. It is easy, but often important, to understand what is going on.

In closing, I will list the run-levels, and what each run-level provides:

0: Shut down the OS (without powering off the machine)
1, s, S: Single-User mode. Networking is not enabled.
2: Networking enabled (not NFS, Printers)
3: Normal operating mode (including NFS, Printers)
4: Not normally used
5: Shut down the OS and power off the machine
6: Reboot the OS.

Some GNU/Linux distributions change these definitions – in particular, Debian provides all network services at runlevel 2, not 3. Run-level 5 is also sometimes used to start the graphical (X) interface.

Pipes, piping, pipelines… whatever you call them, are very powerful – in fact, they are one of the core tenets of the philosophy behind UNIX (and therefore Linux). They are also, really, very simple, once you understand them. The way to understand them, is by playing with them, but if you don’t know what they do, you don’t know where to start… Catch-22!

So, here are some simple examples of how the pipe works.

Let’s see the code

$ grep steve /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f 6
/home/steve
$
What did this do? There are two UNIX commands there: grep and cut. The command “grep steve /etc/passwd” finds all lines in the file /etc/passwd which contain the text “steve” anywhere in the line. In my case, this has one result:steve:x:1000:1000:Steve Parker,,,:/home/steve:/bin/bash
The second command, “cut -d: -f6” cuts the line by the delimiter (-d) of a colon (“:“), and gets field (-f) number 6. This is, in the /etc/passwd file, the home directory of the user.

So what? Show me some more

This is the main point of this article; once you’ve seen a few examples, it normally all becomes clear.

What I did here, was three commands: “find . -type f -ls” finds regular files, and lists them in an “ls”-style format: permissions, owner, size, etc.
“cut -c14-” cuts out the first 14 characters, which mess up the formatting on this website (!), and aren’t very interesting.
“sort -n -k 5” does a numeric (-n) sort, on field 5 (-k5), which is the size of the file.
So this gives me a list of the files in this directory (and subdirectories), ordered by file size. That’s much more useful than “ls -lS“, which restricts itself to the current directory, but not subdirectories.

(As an aside, I have to admit that I only concocted this by trying to think of an example; it actually seems really useful, and worth making into an alias… I must do a post about “alias” some time!)

So how does it work?

This seems pretty straightforward: get lines containing “steve” from the input file (“grep steve /etc/passwd“), and get the sixth field (where fields are marked by colons) (“cut -d: -f6“). You can read the full command from left to right, and see what happens, in that order.

How does it really work?

EG1 Explained

There are some gotchas when you start to look at the plumbing. Because we’re using the analogy of a pipe (think of water flowing through a pipe), the OS actually sets up the commands in the reverse order. It calls cutfirst, then it calls grep. If you have (for example) a syntax error in your cut command, then grep will never be called.
What actually happens is this:

A “pipe” is set up – a special entity which can take input, which it passes, line by line, to its output.

cut is called, and its input is set to be the “pipe”.

grep is called, and its output is set to be the “pipe”.

As grep generates output, it is passed through the pipe, to the waiting cut command, which does its own simple task, of splitting the fields by colons, and selecting the 6th field as output.

EG2 Explained

For EG2, “sort” is called first, which ties to the second (rightmost) pipe for its input. Then “cut” is called, which ties to the second pipe for its output, and the first (leftmost) pipe for its input. Then, “find” is called, which ties to the first pipe for its output.
So, the output of “find” is piped into “cut“, which strips off the first 14 characters of the “find” output. This is then passed to “sort“, which sorts on field 5 (of what it receives as input), so the output of the entire pipeline, is a numerically sorted list of files, ordered by size.

The previous post dealt with pipes, though the example may not have been the best for those who are not accustomed to the concept.

There are a few concepts to be understood – mainly, that of two (or more) processes operating together, how they put their data out, and how the get their data in. UNIX deals with multiple processes, all running (conceptually, at least) at the same time, on different CPUs, each with a standard input (stdin), and standard output (stdout). Pipes connect one process’s stdout to another’s stdin.

What do we want to pipe? Let’s say we’ve got a small 80×25 terminal screen, and lots of files. The ls command will spew out tons of data, faster than we can read it. There’s a handy utility called “more“, which will show a screen-worth of text, then prompt “more”. When you hit the space bar, it will scroll down a screen. You can hit ENTER to scroll one line.

I’m sure that you’ve worked this out already, but here is how we combine these two commands:

$ ls | more
<the first screenful of files is shown>
--More--

What happens here, is that the “more” command is started up first, then the “ls” command. The output of “ls” is piped to the input of “more”, so it can read the data.

Most such tools can also work another way, too:
$ more myfile.txt
<the first screenful of "myfile.txt" is shown>
--More--

The Simple Maths post seems to be the most popular article in the so-far short life of this blog.

It’s also something that I have received a few emails about recently, so I feel like posting a bit more on the subject.

I think that the code can speak for itself… We implement a loop, which calls the builtin read function (I’m not sure the “-p” flag, to provide a prompt, is universal. It does work with the Bash builtin. If it doesn’t work on your *nix, it’s really only for show, so you can live without it.

Because read works on standard input (aka “stdin”), it will work interactively from the keyboard, or direct from a file (one number per line).

We use two methods of doing maths in the shell:

expr, because it’s a simple and easily-read way to do simple maths: n=`expr $n + 1`

bc, because it is more powerful. Do have a play with bc interactively, it can do a lot... see below.

So, we can write a fairly simple script (read down, it's only actually 11 lines of code without the comments), which is actually quite versatile - it can do running averages, it can be interactive or run from cron, called from another script, even used as a function.

So, here's the code. It should be fairly self-explanatory, but do have a look at the interactive bc sample session below, to see what we are doing with bc. Also, do play with bc (some Linux distros have dropped it from the default install recently, so you'll have to yast -i bc, or equivalent)

The Script - Calculate Averages

#!/bin/sh
# Calculate mean (average) of integer data
# Initialise the variables
n=0 # n being the number of (valid) data provided
sum=0 # sum being the running total of all data
# Note that by using ^D (aka "EOF") to quit, this
# script will work just as well interactively, as
# when provided with a file containing the data.
while read -p "Enter a number (^D to quit): " x
do
# expr is useful for simple maths
sum=`expr $sum + $x`
# If this fails, it was non-numeric input
if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]; then
# Okay, it was valid input.
n=`expr $n + 1`
# We can provide a "running average" here;
# I'll comment it out for now.
# echo "Running Average:"
# echo "scale=2;$sum/$n" | bc
# echo
fi
done
# Okay, we've done the loop.
# Present the data.
echo "Overall Average:"
# bc is more useful than expr for
# more involved maths, though its
# syntax, particularly in a script,
# is possibly less obvious.
# Using bc interactively is easier
# than using it in a shell script
echo "scale=2;$sum/$n" | bc

If you’ve used any other language, then you are probably quite familiar with how variables work, and how they are referred to. If not, then the following examples should suffice to cover the two most common options:

PHP (amongst others)

$foo="hello, world";
echo $foo;

This sets the “foo” variable to be “hello, world!”, and then echoes it out. Notice how “foo” is always preceded by a dollar ($) symbol. That denotes it as a variable. Whether we’re setting or reading its contents, it’s always “$foo“.